Although all his endeavours to find the key belonging to the door of the staircase leading to the upper story had failed, Lucius had not allowed himself to be baffled in his determination to explore those unoccupied rooms. Now that Lucille’s prostration and the Winchers’ dismissal had made him in a manner master of the house, he sent for a blacksmith and had the lock picked, and then went up-stairs to explore, accompanied by the man, whom he ordered to open the doors of the rooms as he had opened the door of the staircase. There was little to reward his perseverance in those desolate attic chambers. Most of them were empty; but in one—that room whose door he had seen stealthily opened and stealthily closed on his previous visit to those upper regions—he found some traces of occupation. Two or three articles of battered old furniture—an old stump bedstead of clumsy make, provided with bedding and blankets, which lay huddled upon it as if just as its last occupant had left it—the ashes of a fire in the narrow grate—a table, with an old ink-bottle, a couple of pens, and a sheet of ink-stained blotting-paper—an empty bottle smelling of brandy on the mantelpiece, a bottle which, from its powerful odour, could hardly have been emptied very long ago—a tallow-candle, sorely gnawed by rats or mice, in an old metal candlestick on the window-seat—a scrap of carpet spread before the hearth, a dilapidated arm-chair drawn up close to it: a room which, to Lucius Davoren’s eye, looked as if it had been the lair of some unclean creature—one of those lost wretches in whom the fashion of humanity has sunk to its lowest and vilest phase. He looked round the room with a shudder. ‘There has been some one living here lately,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘Ay, sir,’ answered the blacksmith, ‘it looks like it; some one who wasn’t over particklar about his quarters, I should think, by the look of the place. But he seems to have had summat to comfort him,’ added the man, with mild jocosity, pointing to the empty bottle on the chimneypiece. Some one had occupied that room; but who was that occupant? And had Lucille known this fact when she so persistently denied the evidence of her lover’s senses—when she had shown herself so palpably averse to his making any inspection of those rooms? Who could have been hidden there with her cognisance, with her approval? About whom could she have been thus anxious? For a moment the question confounded him. He could only wonder, in blank dull amazement. Then, in the next moment, the lover’s firm faith arose in rebuke of that brief suspicion.